Talk:Event Missions/@comment-27093003-20160904220745/@comment-28930691-20160905171649
I did a bit more number-crunching and testing and I think I know where ExilScientist's unusual luck is coming from. It is common knowledge in math and engineering that the human brain is a terrible random number generator. This is because we expect there to be short-term evenness, which always results in the string of data being too smooth. So to everyone reading this, there's one primary point that I want you to take away from this: Random =/= Smooth There is a strong tendency for results to clump in a true random string of data. To give an example, let's take my previous test of tossing 20 coins in a row. 20 isn't a whole lot, so people would probably be surprised to see a string of 5 or more of the same number show up in that row. So what are the odds of that happening? It's actually about 64%. In other words, seeing a string like that is about twice as likely to happen as it is not, even though, intuitively, we don't think it should. That supposedly "random" string I posted in my previous post... very unlikely to happen on account of being way too smooth. Now let's apply that to drops of silver units, which is generally agreed to have odds of 10%. So let's do another 20 runs here on a map with only one such drop (like Calliope). What are the odds of getting two silver units in a row during that string. It's actually about 17%. Not great odds, but better than 1 in 6. Given the large amount of players here, there should be hundreds of people who have this happen to them. Getting three units in a row? Still about 2% odds. However, most people allow for some gaps in the string, because, after all, getting 3 out of 5 in a row is still pretty good. This massively increases the odds again. I actually had one such string when farming Calliopes last night after getting 10+ blanks in a row, but I was using the same units and setup the whole time. Now, as for the claim that certain units increase certain drop rates, there have been some indications as to what the methodology for the test was. You try different units and different setups and you take note of which one of these results in better drops. If it doesn't result in a drop, you try a new setup and try again. That means that you don't even start recording the results of a particular setup until you get a drop from it and at 10% odds, that heavily skews the results. Basically, every time you get a non-satisfactory result, you discard the string and start a new one. In other words, all you have done is create a method that naturally seeks out these clumps I just described and isolates them. Of course, they don't last for long and after a while, the Law of Large Numbers reasserts itself, but then you just claim that "Nutaku changes the winning unit after a few days".